The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture

A few days ago, my colleague Fruzsina Eördögh quoted me in an article about Boys’ Love, that niche, distinctly feminine genre targeted at girls who like boys.

It’s just the latest time I’ve been asked about my thoughts on BL, by a list of people that includes friends, colleagues, former employers, and even prospective employers (I guess I’m in a particularly unusual line of business in this respect).

Lately, especially when I’m speaking to outsiders who don’t watch BL, or even anime, I tell them something simplified, a little bit like what I said to Fruzsina:

“Two guys together is a safe sexual environment, free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence.”

In my defense, this is only the first line of a long conversation Fruzsina and I had over Gchat trying to unpack what it is that makes BL so alluring to women, especially young women. But let me explain myself a little further.

A “safe space”… for women

When I say BL is “free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence,” I really mean the viewer. In a BL romance, there is no female avatar to worry about. When you take the woman out of the equation, the female viewer is free to not worry about danger for a change.

In a hetero romance show, there are a lot of disasters that could befall a female love interest. She could get killed off, in order to motivate the male hero. She could get raped to move the plot. She could be slut shamed for her sexual feelings.

Really, it’s that last part that makes BL such a safe space for young women. Men are “supposed” to have sexual feelings, and they’re never shamed for them in the media. So when women consume romances between two men, the feelings of guilt they’d otherwise have for enjoying it disappear.

Basically, there are several different reasons young women could be drawn to BL, and none of them say anything good about our society’s relationship with female sexuality. It’s nothing like the “two is better than one” explanation of why straight men like lesbian porn. For one thing, BL isn’t even supposed to be pornographic most of the time.

Why is rape a BL theme anyway?

The other problematic part of my quote is when I say BL takes place in a “safe sexual environment.”

If you’re a BL fan, you’ve probably got alarm bells going off. As fans know, rape and non-consent are hallmark cliches in BL classics like Gravitation, FAKE, even Junjou Romantica, the series Fruzsina used to illustrate the article!

But that’s the really difficult part. Since concern about getting raped is such a traumatic part of daily life for women, why are BL fans consuming so many series with non-consent themes?

First, it’s important to note that most BL is VERY tame. The most we ever see on screen is kissing. Implied sex, and implied rape, take place off screen and are referred to after the fact in order to drive the plot.

Perhaps in BL, the line between fantasy and reality is so strict that female viewers can let their guards down. BL is highly fictional. It’s not meant to portray a realistic gay relationship. (There IS another genre targeted at gay men, called bara or Men’s Love.) One common BL trope is to have a seme, a masculine aggressor, and an uke, a feminine submissive.

These character types look so different from actual humans that they give us hilarious memes like “yaoi hands,” a syndrome where the seme’s hand is bigger than the uke’s head. When creators resort to rape as a plot device (and I say “resort” since I think it’s uncreative), it perhaps seems as surreal as every other aspect of the relationship. Maybe. I don’t have a final answer for this, and apparently, neither does anyone else.

My sordid BL backstory

I got into BL the same way Fruzsina did—the same way a lot of teen girls do: real boys are scary. (I didn’t realize that I thought this way because of the media indoctrination I’d already received.) I certainly wasn’t ready to date them, and I didn’t even want to think about what it was like to be with them. BL let me explore my sexuality without worrying about either of those things.

I wrote terrible, childish fanfiction where my favorite anime characters had crushes on each other and occasionally got to first base. My middle school friend group obtained a copy of FAKE, one of the first BL titles released in the US (Fun fact: you can now watch it online). I pirated Gravitation, even though it took more than a week to download. (Sorry, anime industry! I own it legally now.)

And then, I just stopped liking it for a long time. In high school, I started dating boys who were, unsurprisingly, nothing like the boys in my BL shows or fanfiction. (If it isn’t clear by now, BL characters are young women in male bodies, mirrors of ourselves.) I didn’t need the safety of BL anymore once I was ready to learn what boys are really like.

Weirdly, I didn’t get back into BL until after I was married. Free! came out this summer and it was like BL junk food. It felt good to watch a show that was targeted right at me for a change. I ended up watching it with my husband and a mutual friend, who both got kind of hooked on the plot.

Going online to check out the state of BL fanfiction, I was floored by the sheer amount hat exists today compared to when I was a teen. There’s not just BL, but slash, a genre of fanfiction/fanart for pairing together same-sex couples from basically anything, from The Avengers to real life hockey teams. Slash is just as old as BL; it just wasn’t on my radar before. That means women who aren’t even into anime are taking part.

BL isn’t going away; it’s actually getting bigger. And until our culture starts telling a different story to young women about their sexuality and bodies, the appeal of BL is just going to grow.

A couple of years ago at NYCC, Deb Aoki once mentioned that she was surprised that boys’ love wasn’t getting attention in the U.S. at the CBLDF panel that talked about people being arrested for having controversial manga.

BL is going to keep growing, yes. But I am worried about the future discrimination that BL fans will face going forward when manga is still treated like kids’ stuff.

Getting our culture to understand is going to be a constant struggle, but I think that if you make small victories along the way and maybe change a few people’s minds, you’re good.

What do you think of the difference in portrayal of spousal rape and acquaintance rape in BL? In Gravitation both Yuki and Shuuichi experience a gang rape, which clearly appears as a traumatic experience. Then there is spousal rape that features prominently in the west via Shungiku Nakamura’s work, which carries an air of acceptance and post-rape consent.

Could this kind of acceptance of spousal rape be simply the reproduction of the varying legal status and court room decisions?

Additionally, if the uke is seen as essentially as an avatar for women to identify with, then couldn’t that be the perpetuation of rape in BL? Would having sexually active uke ala Sensitive Pornograph de-legitimize the spousal rape tactic of publishers and authors to initiate the physical relationship?

Thank you for writing the article. In the years I’ve been reading/researching BL and yaoi, I avoided researching rape because most of the research really never got me thinking in theory terms.

thedigitalbug

Quite insightful post. I am curious what your thoughts are to related genres as compared to BL such as reverse harem or even yuri.

Em

I assume you’re talking about BL anime, and not manga, right? The anime is usually tame and fade-to-black stuff, but in no way is BL/Yaoi manga mostly tame. I’d say that about 80% of the BL manga I see is very explicit, with only a nod to censorship with a tiny black screentone strip that covers absolutely nothing (or maybe the occasional Glowing Cone of Light). Fluids and interesting sound effects everywhere. Only the remaining 20% I encounter has just a kiss or just a fade to black. Or maybe I just gravitate to smut :)

I’ve always been of the opinion that the best way to change something is to take direct action. In this case, I have never been a fan of the rape themes in BL -and as I’m working at making my career in comics/manga- I intend that MY BL story lines feature a more realistic response, as well as the most likely consequences of such actions. Gender doesn’t always stop a rapist, and it is just as traumatic for males as it is for females. Rape is NOT required to establish or maintain a relationship! Indeed, the consequences are far more negative in reality. I’m quite sure I could go on at some length, but I will refrain.

sunflower

Maybe BL is prominent in rape because women are so constantly confronted with rape, and this is a safe way to think about it. I’m a mod for a fan group for a manga notorious for non-con, and over the years I’ve found an incredibly high number of women with rape and abuse problems drawn to the story. I am one of them. The story, distasteful as it is for some, was a safe way for me to think about and eventually deal with my rape experience.

And you need to keep in mind that BL is fantasy for women. It’s a safe head space where we control what’s going on, and subvert it for our sexual pleasure. It takes something real on the outside world that is defined by our control being stripped from us, and lets us use it for our pleasure in fantasy. It’s incredibly empowering for those of us who’ve been victims in the past.

So while lots of people turn their noses up at rape tropes in BL, the truth is that for some of us, it’s a life saver.

CharenCharenCharentais

It is really hard for someone who suffered about rape, and who suffers every time that rape comes to the mind, to find “rape-free” yaoi or BL. Also, why is rape considered so much as nothing more than entertainment? All this makes me very sad, since I love bishie characters.

Veronica Agnelli

Maybe, women like power-fantasies where a man sweeps them off of their
feet without their explicit consent, taking the decision for them. It’s
really that simple, women want a man who takes charge, and is dominant,
and at the same time they want to like the experience even if they
didn’t explicitly consent to it, you make it sound like it’s just a Yaoi
trope, but is really an erotica for women trope. An impossible fantasy.
A man who’s so dominant and passionate who will stop at nothing to have
them, who’s obsessed with them, but at the same time is handsome and
not a creep, who will read her mind and see when it’s a serious “no” or a
“no” that if ignored will end with awesome sex for both parties and an
happy ever after.
(see 50 shades of gray)

Rape is not common only to yaoi, but to all erotica especially in Japan, Het targeted at girls also has it a lot.
I think that hentai targeted at men has it a little less, because normal men don’t want to see themselves as rapists

MiyuEinzbern

I’m a long time Yuri/GL fan by earlier interests, but after searching for reasons why other rooted yuri fans dont like BL for reasons not in disinterest & also searching about why BL is so interesting, this article worded my interest best.
“Two guys together is a safe sexual environment, free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence.”
“safe sexual environment, free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence” that latter part was what struck me. I also have this unease with Yuri stories ’cause I’m always worried there’s gonna be some NTR or some guy taking the girl-girl relationship apart (I think similarly in BL, when same sex rivals get in the way, it’s not as much a problem as it is with having the opposite gender involved?*) and I have encountered a unfortunately significant number of stories like that or have used it as plot driver (latter pisses me off the most even though I can sense some use of realism there it still is frustrating). With girl relations, there’s always that sense of fear and anxiety that the relationship will be ruined once again by the society’s so called “norms”* ; because of the unease I get from such sexually serious/”adult” stories, I sometimes end up spoiling the ending or dropping the manga once I read that part of it. I just can’t stand or get used to how slut-shaming or rape is used as a plot point (cheating with someone of the opposite sex too, to a lesser extent)
By the more older GL fans, I’m usually called naive or too idealistic for that, and though I can understand why, I still don’t like that part of stories.
I guess this is “unfair genetically/socially/historically” in a way to girls (at least in our early 21st century society), with boys being typically/heteronormatively viewed as the “top” and the girls on “bottom” (you get what I mean) thus boys are treated as having to take the initiative and girls be ‘accepting’ of it (I hate that concept; I wonder if it will change in the coming future).
Well, point being, your article explanation has fueled my interest in BL> I’m going to look into it some more! (whether that be because I want to find something a story more sexually secure or not)